Workerbee: the hive-engine governance token
A week or two ago, a comment by @hirohurl was the original inspiration for this post. In his comment he told me that he just powered up some BEE tokens to vote for our Liotes Hive-Engine Witness. The BEE token is however not the correct token to do so...
What is Hive-Engine governance?
Since you are on the Hive blockchain, you are probably aware that there is a Hive governance system where you can vote on witnesses and also on DHF proposals. Your vote is defined by the amount of Hive Power that you have. The more Hive staked, the more your vote matters.
Few people know however that there is also a Hive-Engine governance. Hive-Engine is a second layer infrastructure on the Hive blockchain. If you use Hive-Engine, Tribaldex, Tribes, Diesel Pools, Beeswap, then you are also using the Hive-Engine infrastructure.
The governance aspect on Hive-Engine rotates mainly around voting for Hive-Engine witnesses. Few people are however aware that the governance token of hive-engine is the 'Workerbee' token.
What is the Workerbee token?
I would say that the Workerbee token is not a well known token and that is probably the reason why the Hive-Engine governance is limited to a restricted circle of people. The workerbee token is a mining token. At a regular interval 20 workerbee tokens are selected randomly and they receive BEE tokens as rewards. There are in total 240 payouts per day of 1 BEE each. To be able to qualify for these mining rewards, the Workerbee tokens need to be staked. It's also only staked workerbee tokens that give governance votes.
What return for Workerbee tokens?
If you stake WB tokens, you need to understand what are the probabilities for getting a reward to grasp your potential return. There are close to 250'000 staked WB. If you have 1 WB, your chances are 0.096% to get a daily reward. Hence, the chance to get a reward is pretty low and you might get no more than 3 payouts per year. The more tokens you own, the more regular your return will be. With 100 WB tokens, you will get a reward about every 10 days.
The return that you get depends mainly of two factors, the price at which you bought your WB's and the price of BEE tokens. If you buy WB at around 2.4 Hive, your APR will be around 5%. However, if you manage to purchase WB at around 1 Hive, you can get up to 12% APR.
If you have a small amount of WB tokens, a good idea is to delegate them to the pool of @ph1102. The advantage is that by pooling a lot of WB tokens in a same pool, the return gets much more balanced and regular. So you will get a reward even if you own only a handful of tokens. In addition to that, every week a bonus token is distributed which increases your return on your workerbees. Learn more about the WB pool here. The disadvantage when you delegate your WB tokens to the pool is that you also delegate your governance vote.
Where can you purchase WB?
There is of course the market swap.hive:WB on tribaldex or hive-engine but you also have a dieselpool BEE:WB where the token price is often more interesting than on the market.
Is it worth it?
Compared to a lot of other tokens on Hive-Engine, WB and BEE tokens are both pretty stable in price. They have both several use cases that make them interesting to hold. If you manage to purchase WB at a good price, you will enjoy a nice APR and in addition to that you can vote on HE witnesses. You can do it on several platforms like tribaldex or primersion.
Liotes as HE Witness
With the Liotes project we have been running a hive engine witness for a very long time. We also run a node that can be used by projects on hive that use the hive-engine layer. We have created a tool to help projects pay dividends to their delegators. We also run our ourpick curation project and have several incentives to promote activity and staking on the hive blockchain. We are very grateful if you could support our witness with your vote.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
Please consider supporting our Witness nodes:
Thanks for this, I finally understand the difference! (yes, I'm a slow learner 😁)
!ALIVE
!BBH
!INDEED 👍
Well, I'm happy I could help you to understand it :-)
I don't see delegation of my WORKERBEE voting power as a disadvantage. Because I want to vote for the Liotes witness. And I believe that @ph1102 is a lot less likely to forget to renew the vote than I am! 😀
!BBH
I hope he doesn't forget lol. Joke aside, I believe that it's something that most people tend to forget and it can be a good idea to delegate it to somebody who deals with in on a regular basis. You can support Liotes and get a nicer return in addition to that.
Even though I always knew the difference and the possibilities of WB, this post reminded me that I can still buy WB — but this time straight into the liquidity pool. And of course, they immediately went into @ph1102 pool! 🙃
Thanks for the reminder post! 🙌
Great article, @achim03! Your clear explanation of WORKERBEE as Hive-Engine's governance and miner token really highlights its potential in the ecosystem.
Thanks for the explanation, I do read the token being mentioned in ph1102's posts but I didn't know it's actually a governance token used on Hive-engine. Where is the governance/witnesses page located for Hive-engine? I sometimes browse Tribaldex and can't seem to have noticed it.